It is rare for a family show to be both funny and spine-tinglingly creepy, but an achievement playwright Lewis Hetherington pulls off in his imaginative reworking of the 18th-century fable. You would expect one to cancel out the other, but here the narrative cracks forward with such certainty, you can afford the odd moment to laugh.
It is funny that Baron Aaron (Tyler Collins) is deep in denial about his failed shipping business; that Beauty (Israela Efomi) carries with her a copy of an etiquette manual called How to Be a Lovely Young Lady; that her sister, Bright (Holly Howden Gilchrist), cares more for inventions than everyday expressions of affection; that the cat and dog (Michael Guest and Martin Donaghy) are falling ever so sweetly in love; and that the housekeeper Mrs Flobberlyboo (Elicia Daly) has a taste for modernist singing that makes the rest of Nikola Kodjabashia’s angular score seem conventional.
Funny too that the Beast (Nicholas Marshall) gets a build-up of shadow-puppet ferocity and off-stage growling before turning up in feathery turquoise, sticky-out ears and, later, a pink bow tie. It does not take much for Beauty to fall for such a forlorn creature in a play less interested in the story’s undercurrent of adolescent awakening – the decorous feminine taming the dangerous masculine – than in the way love can be variously thwarted, unrequited and misunderstood.
If, consequently, you miss some of the tension in the Beauty/Beast relationship, you are richly compensated in the staging by Dominic Hill and Joanna Bowman which, behind the fun and musicality, is serious and scary.
The set by Rachael Canning, with its broken slats and deep perspective, is dreamlike and provisional, the Beast’s palace a warren of shifting staircases and passageways where doors – and the secrets behind them – pull in and out of focus. Lizzie Powell’s lighting adds to the gothic intensity as Mrs Flobberlyboo reveals her dark intent (“I’m not upset, I’m evil”), while the sisters and their pets go on an interspecies quest for the true meaning of love. Acted with urgency and wit, it is a nourishing tale of acceptance.
